The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 103, May, 1866

"8 South Bank, Regent's Park,

London, March 24, 1856

"My venerable Friend,—

"Though I very gratefully appreciate the generosity of your intentions, still I must confess that few things have ever affected me more painfully than to see from the 'Times' of to-day my private circumstances—the sacred domain of life—thrust as an object of commiseration upon public discussion,—a miserable subject of public sneers.

"My head turns giddy at the very thought, and my resignation is scarcely able to overcome the shame. I don't know how I shall muster sufficient resolution to appear in public ever hereafter; and I fear, with all your good intentions, you shall have become the involuntary instrument for driving me out of England before my time. I really scarcely can imagine what else I have to do, unless you devise some means for healing the wound.

"I am poor, very poor; but there was, I dare say, something honorable in that poverty, something sacred I would say. But seeing it made the object of a public appeal for commiseration, I feel as if everything that was sacred in my position had undergone a profanation.

"I repeat that I respect and appreciate the nobility of your impulses, but I regret that such a step should have been taken without my having an idea of its possibility.

"I will say no more, but leave it with your prudence and discretion to mitigate the blow your kindness has inflicted on me. And remain with wonted esteem, only mingled with grief,

"Yours very truly,

"Kossuth.

"To Walter Savage Landor."

Opposite the nervous yet legible scrawl of the noble and maligned Magyar, Landor traced the following answer.

"It is impossible for me to rest until I have attempted to remove the vexation I have caused to the man I most venerate of any upon earth.

"My noble Kossuth! 'the sacred domain of your life' is far more extensive than your measurement. Neither your house nor your banker's are its confines. Do not imagine that the world is ignorant of your circumstances; it would be a crime to be indifferent to them.

"The editor of the Atlas, in announcing that he had secured your co-operation, published a manifesto. I know nothing of this editor; but so long as you contributed to the paper, I was your humble subsidiary.

"Consider how many men, wealthier than you and me, have accepted the offers of those who came forward to indemnify the persecuted for the demolition of their property. Ask yourself if Demosthenes or Milton, the two most illustrious defenders of liberty, by speech and pen, would have thrust aside the tribute which is due to such men alone. Would you dash out the signature of one who declares you his trustee for a legacy to your children? No, you would not. Neither will you reject the proofs of high esteem, however manifested, which England, however debased, is anxious to give.

"Believe me ever sincerely and affectionately yours,

"W. S. Landor.

"March 27."

Landor was essentially a hero-worshipper. His admiration for Washington exceeded that entertained by him for any man of any time. Franklin, too, he greatly esteemed. "Ah, if you had but another Washington and Franklin!" he exclaimed one day. To have suffered for freedom was the open-sesame to Landor's heart; nor did age in any way chill this noble enthusiasm, as the letter here inserted amply proves. It was sufficient to name Kossuth to bring fire to the old man's eye and eulogistic volubility to his tongue.

Orsini, too, was a great favorite with him. Coming in one morning as usual, and sitting down in the arm-chair by the fire, he took from under his arm a small paper-covered book, saying: "I have brought you something that I know you will like to read. Giallo and I have enjoyed it immensely; and a better critic than Giallo is not to be found in all Italy, though I say it who shouldn't. An approving wag of his tail is worth all the praise of all the Quarterlies published in the United Kingdom." Hereupon Giallo, apparently delighted at this compliment, barked and frisked about like a creature bewitched, jumped into his master's lap, and did not return to a quiescent state until he had kissed his master's face. "Down, Giallo, down!" finally cried Landor. "Where are your manners, sir? Don't you know it is very uncivil to interrupt a conversation? And, moreover, remember never to spoil a tête-à-tête." Then turning to me, Landor continued, presenting the book, "Here it is; the Memorie Politiche di Felice Orsini, which you will find vastly entertaining and far more romantic than any novel. A very noble, brave fellow was that Orsini, and handsome too! It is a great pity he did not succeed in his plot against that scoundrel Napoleon, although it was not well planned, and failure was written on the face of it." Right gladly did I read memoirs which were all that Landor (and Giallo) claimed. It is strange that this book should be so little known. Were students of Italian to transfer their affections from Le mie Prigioni to these Memorie Politiche, they would be the gainers; for the patriotism of Silvio Pellico is but a sick and weakly sentiment compared with the dauntless energy and unflinching determination of Orsini. His escape from Mantua, aided by no other friends than four sheets and four towels, and described most admirably and in detail by him, is one of the most brilliant and perilous exploits in the annals of prison history. Those who knew Orsini have since told me that he was one of the most lovable of men, as he was one of the most handsome,—full of the fire of intense and stalwart manhood, yet as gentle as a young girl. Disappointed and wronged in his domestic relations, a loving but wretched father, and stung to madness by his country's servitude, whose cause he early made his own, Orsini's life was from the beginning a tragedy. Fate seemed to have wrested from him every form of happiness in order to make him a more desperate conspirator. He conspired from pure love of liberty, for which at any moment he was ready to die. Those who merely know Orsini by the last act of his life can have no proper appreciation of the wonderful purity and nobility of his character. In his attempt to assassinate Louis Napoleon, he was actuated by as exalted motives as led Charlotte Corday to do a bloody deed. Exiled, a price upon his head, deceived by those in whom he had put faith, in despair at the state of Italian affairs, Orsini committed what he himself, in a letter to his intended victim, Napoleon, confessed to be un fatale errore mentale,—assassination being in direct opposition to the faith and facts of his life up to the conspiracy of the 14th of January. For this fatal error he offered his own blood as an expiatory sacrifice. Few nobler heads than Orsini's have bowed before the guillotine.

In "Pericles and Aspasia," Cleone has written with Landor's pen, that "study is the bane of boyhood, the aliment of youth, the indulgence of manhood, and the restorative of old age." Of this theory there could be no better example than Landor's self. That life which outlasted all the friends of its zenith was made endurable by a constant devotion to the greatest works of the greatest men. Milton and Shakespeare were his constant companions, by night as well as by day. "I never tire of them," he would say; "they are always a revelation. And how grand is Milton's prose! quite as fine as his poetry!" He was very fond of repeating the following celebrated lines that have the true ring to a tuneful ear as well as to an appreciative intellect:—

 
"But when God commands to take the trumpet
And blow a dolorous or thrilling blast,
It rests not with man's will what he shall say
Or what he shall conceal."
 

"Was anything more harmonious ever written?" Landor would ask. "But Milton, you know, is old-fashioned. I believe I am old-fashioned. However, it is rather an honor to be classed thus, if one may keep such distinguished company." How devoted a student of Milton Landor was is evidenced in his delightful critical conversation between Southey and himself, wherein he declared, "Such stupendous genius, so much fancy, so much eloquence, so much vigor of intellect never were united as in Paradise Lost." Yet the lover is still an impartial critic, and does not indorse all things. Quoting the charming couplet,

 
"Yielded with coy submission, modest pride,
And sweet, reluctant, amorous delay,"
 

he says: "I would rather have written these two lines than all the poetry that has been written since Milton's time in all the regions of the earth." In 1861 Landor sent me the last lines he ever wrote, addressed to the English Homer, entitled

"MILTON IN ITALY

 
"O Milton! couldst thou rise again, and see
The land thou lovedst in an earlier day!
See, springing from her tomb, fair Italy
(Fairer than ever) cast her shroud away,—
That tightly-fastened, triply-folded shroud!
Around her, shameful sight! crowd upon crowd,
Nations in agony lie speechless down,
And Europe trembles at a despot's frown."
 

The despot is, of course, Louis Napoleon, for Landor would never allow that the French Emperor comprehended his epoch, and that Italian regeneration was in any way due to the co-operation of France. In his allegorical poem of "The gardener and the Mole," the gardener at the conclusion of the argument chops off the mole's head, such being the fate to which the poet destined Napoleon. No reference, however, is made to "that rascal" in the lines to Milton inserted in the "Heroic Idyls," and as the printed version was, doubtless, Landor's own preference, it is but just to insert it here:—

 
"O Milton! couldst thou rise again and see
The land thou lovedst in thy earlier day
See springing from her tomb fair Italy
(Fairer than ever) cast her shroud away,
That tightly-fastened, triply-folded shroud,
Torn by her children off their mother's face!
O couldst thou see her now, more justly proud
Than of an earlier and a stronger race!"
 

There certainly is more unity of idea in the printed copy, but so faulty is it in punctuation—or at least for the want of it—that one is warranted in believing the substitution of thy for an, in the second line, to be an erratum. Though Milton visited Italy in his youth, there is no evidence to prove that he did not love it in old age. In its present form the line loses in sense. Nothing annoyed Landor more than to have his manuscript "corrected," and no one's temper was ever more tried than his in this respect; for, having an orthography peculiar to himself, which he maintained was according to the genius of the language, and which printers would persist in translating into the vulgate, Landor grew to be morbidly sensitive concerning revision. It was the more intolerable to him, because of his extreme care in the preparation of his manuscript. Few celebrated authors have written so clear and clean a hand; none ever sent his work to the press in a more highly finished state. Fastidious beyond expression, the labor of correction was unending. Even "Gebir" was subjected to revision, and at one time I was intrusted with quite a long introduction, which, the day after, Landor altered and sent to me the following note.

"Again the old creature comes to bother you. The enclosed is to take the place of what I wrote yesterday, and to cancel, as you will see, what a tolerably good critic" (Southey) "thought too good to be thrown away, &c., &c. I do not think so, but certainly the beginning of 'Gebir' is better with

 
'Kings! ye athirst for conquest,' etc.
 

You are not athirst for it but take it coolly."

Later, this introduction passed out of my hands. Previously Landor had written on a slip of paper now before me:—

"'Gebir' should begin thus:—

 
'Hear ye the fate of Gebir!'
 

Not

 
'I sing the fates of Gebir,'"—
 

which is a correction suggested to future publishers of this poem.

It would be a hopeful sign were our young American writers inoculated with somewhat of Landor's reverence for literature, as it was no less than reverence that made him treat ideas with respect, and array them in the most dignified language, thus making of every sentence a study. And it is well that these writers should know what intense labor is required to produce anything great or lasting. "Execution is the chariot of genius," William Blake, the great poet-artist, has said; and it is just this execution which is unattainable without immense application and fastidiousness. If patience be genius,—"La patience cherche et le génie trouve,"—and if execution be its chariot, what possible fame can there be for the slipshod writers of to-day, who spawn columns and volumes at so much a minute, regardless of the good name of their mother tongue, devoid of ideas, which are the product only of brains that have been ploughed up and sown with fruitful seed? An author's severest critic should be himself. To be carried away by the popular current is easy and pleasant, but some fine morning the popular man wakes up to find himself stranded and deserted,—Nature playing queer pranks with currents changing their beds as best suits her fancy;—for even popular taste follows laws of progression, and grows out of one error into a less. Pope wisely maintains that "no man ever rose to any degree of perfection in writing but through obstinacy and an inveterate resolution against the stream of mankind." Unless he mount the chariot of execution, his ideas, however good, will never put a girdle round the earth. They will halt and limp as do his own weary feet.

Landor's enthusiasm for Shakespeare grew young as he grew old, and it was his desire to bid farewell to earth with his eyes resting upon the Shakespeare that so constantly lay open before him. Nothing excited his indignation more than to hear little people of great pretension carpingly criticise the man of whom he makes Southey, in a discussion with Porson, declare, that "all the faults that ever were committed in poetry would be but as air to earth, if we could weigh them against one single thought or image such as almost every scene exhibits in every drama of this unrivalled genius." In three fine lines Landor has said even more:—

 
"In poetry there is but one supreme,
Though there are many angels round his throne,
Mighty, and beauteous, while his face is hid."
 

To Landor's superior acumen, also, we owe two readings of Shakespeare that have made intelligible what was previously "a contradictory inconceivable." Did it ever occur to dealers in familiar quotations that there was a deal of nonsense in the following lines as they are printed?

 
"Vaulting ambition that o'erleaps itself
And falls on the other side."
 

"Other side of what?" exclaims Landor "It should be its sell. Sell is saddle in Spenser and elsewhere, from the Latin and Italian." Yet, in spite of correction, every Macbeth on the stage still maintains in stentorian tones that ambition o'erleaps itself, thereby demonstrating how useless it is to look for Shakespearian scholarship in so-called Shakespearian actors, who blindly and indolently accept theatrical tradition.

Equally important is Landor's correction of the lines

 
"And the delighted spirit
To bathe in fiery floods."
 

"Truly this would be a very odd species of delight. But Shakespeare never wrote such nonsense; he wrote belighted (whence our blighted), struck by lightning; a fit preparation for such bathing."

The last stanza ever inscribed to Shakespeare by Landor was sent to me with the following preface: "An old man sends the last verses he has written, or probably he may ever write to – –."

"SHAKESPEARE IN ITALY

 
"Beyond our shores, beyond the Apennines,
Shakespeare, from heaven came thy creative breath!
'Mid citron grove and overarching vines
Thy genius wept at Desdemona's death:
In the proud sire thou badest anger cease,
And Juliet by her Romeo sleep in peace.
Then rose thy voice above the stormy sea,
And Ariel flew from Prospero to thee.
 

"July 1, 1860."

Dante was not one of Landor's favorites, although he was quite ready to allow the greatness of il gran poeta. He had no sympathy with what he said was very properly called a comedy. He would declare that about one sixth only of Dante was intelligible or pleasurable. Turning to Landor's writings, I find that in his younger days he was even less favorable to Dante. In the "Pentemeron" (the author spelling it so) he, in the garb of Petrarch, asserts that "at least sixteen parts in twenty of the Inferno and Purgatorio are detestable both in poetry and principle; the higher parts are excellent, indeed." Dante's powers of language, he allows, "are prodigious; and, in the solitary places where he exerts his force rightly, the stroke is irresistible. But how greatly to be pitied must he be who can find nothing in Paradise better than sterile theology! and what an object of sadness and consternation he who rises up from hell like a giant refreshed!" While allowing his wonderful originality, Landor goes so far as to call him "the great master of the disgusting"! Dante is not sympathetic.

Yet he wrote the glorious episode of Francesca da Rimini, of which Landor's Boccaccio says: "Such a depth of intuitive judgment, such a delicacy of perception, exists not in any other work of human genius; and from an author who, on almost all occasions, in this part of the work, betrays a deplorable want of it."

Landor used often to say what Cleone has written to Aspasia,—"I do not believe the best writers of love-poetry ever loved. How could they write if they did? where could they collect the thoughts, the words, the courage?" This very discouraging belief admits of argument, for there is much proof to the contrary. Shelley and Keats could not write what they had not felt; and Mrs. Browning's Sonnets from the Portuguese, the most exquisite love-poems in the English language, came direct from the heart. It were hardly possible to make poetry while living it; but when the white heat of passion has passed, and hangs as a beautiful picture on memory's walls, the artist may write his poem. If the best writers of love-poetry have never loved, at least they have been capable of loving, or they could not make the reader feel. Appreciation is necessary to production. But Petrarca was such a poet as Cleone refers to. He was happy to be theoretically miserable, that he might indite sonnets to an unrequited passion: and who is not sensible of their insincerity? One is inclined to include Dante in the same category, though far higher in degree. Landor, however, has conceived the existence of a truly ardent affection between Dante and Beatrice, and it was my good fortune to hear him read this beautiful imaginary conversation. To witness the aged poet throwing the pathos of his voice into the pathos of his intellect, his eyes flooded with tears, was a scene of uncommon interest. "Ah!" said he, while closing the book, "I never wrote anything half as good as that, and I never can read it that the tears do not come." Landor's voice must have been exceedingly rich and harmonious, as it then (1861) possessed much fulness. This was the first and only time I ever heard him read aloud one of his own Conversations.

Petrarch and Boccaccio were highly esteemed by Landor, who did not sympathize with Lord Chesterfield in his opinion that the former deserved his Laura better than his lauro. The best evidence of this predilection is Landor's great work, "The Pentemeron," second only to his greatest, "Pericles and Aspasia." Its couleur locale is marvellous. On every page there is a glimpse of cloudless blue sky, a breath of warm sunny air, a sketch of Italian manner. The masterly gusto with which the author enters into the spirit of Italy would make us believe him to be "the noblest Roman of them all," had he not proved himself a better Grecian. Margaret Fuller realized this when, after comparing the Pentemeron and Petrarca together, she wrote: "I find the prose of the Englishman worthy of the verse of the Italian. It is a happiness to see such marble beauty in the halls of a contemporary."

I gave evidence of great surprise one day upon hearing Landor express himself warmly in favor of Alfieri, as I had naturally concluded, from a note appended to the Conversation between "Galileo, Milton, and a Dominican," that he entertained a sorry opinion of this poet. Reading the note referred to, Landor seemed to be greatly annoyed, and replied: "This is a mistake. It was never my intention to condemn Alfieri so sweepingly." A few days later I received the following correction. "Keats, in whom the spirit of poetry was stronger than in any contemporary, at home or abroad, delighted in Hellenic imagery and mythology, displaying them admirably; but no poet came nearer than Alfieri to the heroic, since Virgil. Disliking, as I do, prefaces and annotations, excrescences which hang loose like the deciduous bark on a plane-tree, I will here notice an omission of mine on Alfieri, in the 'Imaginary Conversations.' The words, 'There is not a glimpse of poetry in his Tragedies,' should be, as written, 'There is not an extraneous glimpse,' &c."

Since then Landor has addressed these lines to Alfieri:—

 
"Thou art present in my sight,
Though far removed from us, for thou alone
Hast touched the inmost fibres of the breast,
Since Tasso's tears made damper the damp floor
Whereon one only light came through the bars," &c.;
 

thus redeeming the unintentioned slur of many years' publicity.

Landor pronounced (as must everyone else) Niccolini to be the best of the recent Italian poets. Of Redi, whose verses taste of the rich juice of the grape in those good old days when Tuscan vines had not become demoralized, and wine was cheaper than water, Landor spoke fondly. Leigh Hunt has given English readers a quaff of Redi in his rollicking translation of "Bacchus in Tuscany," which is steeped in "Montepulciano," "the king of all wine."

But Redi is not always bacchanalian. He has a loving, human heart as well, which Landor has shown in a charming translation given to me shortly after our conversation concerning this poet. "I never publish translations," he remarked at the time; but though translations may not be fit company for the "Imaginary Conversations," the verses from Redi are more than worthy of an abiding place here.

 
"Ye gentle souls! ye love-devoted fair!
Who, passing by, to Pity's voice incline,
O stay awhile and hear me; then declare
If there was ever grief that equals mine.
"There was a woman to whose sacred breast
Faith had retired, where Honor fixt his throne,
Pride, though upheld by Virtue she represt....
Ye gentle souls! that woman was my own.
"Beauty was more than beauty in her face,
Grace was in all she did, in all she said.
In sorrow as in pleasure there was grace....
Ye gentle souls! that gentle soul is fled."